Caught in the middle

Jerry Z. Muller’s book is an enlightening survey of Jews in the
modern world of economic systems.

Throughout the many years it took him to earn his degree this literature major
studiously managed to avoid any university course even remotely touching upon
economics.

Worse, whenever I stumble into reading an op-ed or an article
in a magazine written by some practitioner of the Dismal Science, I invariably
find myself in the position of the rabbi famously adjudicating the
dispute.

Muller is
a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington,
DC, and author of such books as “The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern
European Thought”. As evidenced by the 30 pages of notes to this slim volume, he
is an assiduous scholar.

Yet for all that, Muller is a graceful writer,
blessedly free of the toxic jargon of the social sciences (not a single
“exogenous” – although he suffers from a peculiar tic of diction, namely his
habitual use of the word “salient,” sometimes more than once on the same page).
And based as it is on lectures and essays written over many years, “Capitalism
and the Jews” exhibits occasional repetitions. But all of this is forgivable.
The book is an exhilarating and enlightening survey of Jews in the modern world
of economic systems.

Capitalism, Muller argues, has been good for the
Jews – and vice versa. Muller reviews all of the classic theories explaining the
association of Jews and capitalism. There’s relegation to financial activities
in Christian societies that shunned the same and denied Jews land ownership and
membership in the artisan trades; outsider status and international outlook;
sobriety; a tradition of delayed gratification (save for the children, they
should have a better future); a means of entry into the larger society; and many
more.

Muller does not delve into the contribution of Judaism to Jewish
economic thinking and practice, but he does note that “theirs was a religion
oriented to continuous contact with texts: a culture of handling books, reading
them, and reflecting on their messages. It was a culture of finding
commonalities and distinctions in arguments, and of thinking in
abstractions.”

But, of course, no single explanation suffices. Muller
points out that another despised minority, the Quakers, also prospered in
business, while Armenians by and large did not.

It is important to note
that Jews invented neither capitalism nor communism, but were often accused of
having done both, and were even charged with promoting both simultaneously for
their own particular ends. Muller acknowledges that Jews were prominent among communists
and socialists. (“International Jews... now at last this band of extraordinary
personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe have gripped the
Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the
undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”)

But despite Winston Churchill’s
uncharacteristic fulmination, Muller argues convincingly that economic radicals
were exceptions among the mass of Jews and indeed represented an inverted
pyramid; in no nation did any more than a fraction of the Jewish population ever
favor anti-capitalism over capitalism.

In any event, if Jews who
prospered under capitalism found themselves subject to anti- Semitism, Jews who
embraced the red banner fared even worse. Jews were notable among the post-war
communist regimes in Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Ukraine
and elsewhere, but everywhere, without exception, devout Jewish communists would
ultimately suffer disgrace, imprisonment or execution.

Muller elucidates
all of this sorry business with aplomb and illustrates his points with numerous
references to many renowned political and economic theorists, from Marx and
Engels to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman (who observed that Jews “owe
an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism,” but “for at
least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and
have done much on an ideological level to undermine it”).

I also
appreciated learning of the views of Martin Luther, Jeremy Bentham and Francis
Bacon on lending at interest, which they generally labeled usury. Muller is also
very good on the Zionist thinker Moshe Leib Lilienblum, who argued that European
nationalism would engender anti-Semitism from both capitalist and socialist
fronts, and especially on Dov Ber Borochov, who argued early in the 20th century
that the Jews’ role as economic middlemen in Europe would eventually lead to
“expulsion, or worse.” Muller is also instructive on figures quite unknown to
me, such as the German social scientist Werner Sombart, whose 1911 work “The
Jews and Modern Capitalism” pioneered the theory that Jews were responsible for
creating the modern marketplace, where competition ruled unchecked.

The
only place where things get fuzzy is near the end, where Muller writes glowingly
about the Central European theorist Ernest Gellner. (“By creating a new and
direct relationship between individuals and the government, the rise of the
modern state weakened the individual’s bonds to intermediate social units, such
as the family, the guild, and the church. And by spurring social and
geographical mobility, the market-based economy itself eroded traditional ties.
The result was an emotional vacuum that was often filled by new forms of
identification with the political community of the nation.”)

But maybe mine was
merely the befuddlement of a slacker who never dared take an economics course. I
suspect even those who have will profit greatly from Jerry Z. Muller’s
effervescent "Capitalism and the Jews." •

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